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“He likes to draw,” she murmured.
Daggert felt a cold knife slip into the hard casing surrounding his heart. “Daddy, see what I drew! It’s you, see?” A stick figure with long hair and a horse the size of a mountain had been the last picture Donny ever drew.
“Come,” he said to the woman.
She turned her gaze in his direction and he saw understanding slowly filter through her fatigue. “We’re stopping,” she said. It was a statement of profound need rather than a question.
“Come down,” he said, and when she didn’t move, he added, “I’ve got you.”
He saw her try to swing her leg over the back of the horse, but between that damned foolish way of hitching up her stirrups—trying to ride English style across a desert for hours—and the long day they’d put in, she couldn’t manage to make her muscles work for her.
He gripped her elbow and gave a sharp tug. She slid from the horse, straight into his waiting arms. As her mount sidled away, Daggert staggered back a step, the reins cutting at his wrist and pulling him sideways. But he didn’t release her. He held her to his chest, too aware of her trembling body cradled against his.
He could smell some elusive fragrance wafting from her hair, and above it, the familiar scent of sunshine and bone-dry September desert in southeastern New Mexico. She’d closed her eyes, and he was glad of that because he’d already discovered they were such an incredible blue that they hurt a man to look too deeply into them.
As feisty as she’d been all day, he half anticipated her demanding he get his dirty hands off her. Instead, she turned her head to his chest. “Oh, thank God,” she murmured. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Instinctively, his arms tightened around her.
He carried her a few paces, dragging the reluctant horse behind them, then gently sank to one knee to set her down on the lee side of a sandy mound. She murmured in protest as he pulled his arms away, but she didn’t open her eyes.
Daggert waited for a few seconds, making sure she wasn’t going to slump face first into the sand. She merely leaned her blond head back against the earth and sighed.
He unwound her horse’s reins from his wrist, and, ignoring the abrasion left by the leather ties, led the animal back toward Stone. After a quick survey of the area, Daggert loosely tied both horses to a scraggly branch of a scrub oak. He pulled one of the saddlebags free from Stone’s many packs and quickly withdrew both a canteen of water and some moistened towelettes.
The woman hadn’t moved from her sandy bed and only shook her head when he knelt beside her again.
“Go away, sadist,” she murmured.
“Here’s some water.”
“I’ll bet it’s poisoned,” she said. “You’d make better time if you left me for dead.”
“Drink,” he said. He lifted her cramped hands and frowned at the chafed skin on her palms and between her fingers. She’d obviously gripped both the saddle horn and the reins with that same fierce intensity she put into those knifelike glares he’d felt against his back most of the day.
He held the canteen to her lips and cupped the base of her neck in his hand. Her soft, fluffy cap of hair played with the fine hairs on the back of his hand. She resisted at first, then, as the cold liquid trickled across her lips and down her chin, she roused sufficiently to swallow. When she might have gulped it and caused her stomach to cramp, he pulled the canteen away.
“I’m going to wake up and this will all have been a nightmare. Enrique will be home, eating dinner. I won’t be out in the desert with some stranger who hates women,” she said clearly, if not very logically.
Daggert carefully sealed the water container and set it aside before opening one of the towelettes. With as much gentleness as he might have used on one of his animals, he wiped her brow, her cheeks and the hollow of her slender, sharply marked collarbone.
She moved a little, arching her back to accommodate him. He continued slowly, carefully, bringing her heat down and erasing the dust of a day’s ride from her lovely skin. Her color, he saw, was coming back, giving her a peachy glow in the dusky light. As he continued to bathe her with the cool cloth, he saw her fingers finally begin to relax.
“That’s nice,” she breathed. “I never would have suspected you had it in you.”
He unbuttoned the top button of her elegant blouse and dipped the cool cloth beneath the folds, drawing it near the swell of her breasts, up the arch of each shoulder and back down again.
She sighed once more.
He allowed his fingers to dip a bit lower, cooling her. Heating him.
Her eyelids opened abruptly and eyes as blue and deep as the coldest mountain lake met his squarely. “Enjoying yourself?” she asked.
He gave a final slow swipe before pulling his hand back. “I’m not dead,” he said.
“Something to look forward to, then,” she purred.
He pushed himself erect and walked away from her. He didn’t look back. If he did, he knew he would stare. Even exhausted as she was, her reserves depleted, Daggert knew that short of the silver screen, he’d never seen a woman as staggeringly beautiful and as perfectly formed as Leeza Nelson. As tall as a fashion model and as willowy as any young tree in springtime, she nevertheless filled out her snazzy clothes in all the right places.
And those eyes were as blue as liquid cobalt and as icy as a pond in late winter. One plunge and a man would either drown or feel reborn. Or be killed for getting too close to the edge.
And where everything else about her seemed sleek and elegant, her hair was a slightly mussed cap of blond wisps that seemed to call for his touch. When it had teased the back of his hand as he helped her drink the water, he’d had to force himself not to let his fingers tangle in that spun silk.
The only thing that didn’t match that picture of total perfection had been the brief, glittering blaze of fury he’d glimpsed in her when he’d countermanded her saddle choice early in the day.
Leeza Nelson, female magnate of some big-shot corporation back east, and one of the co-owners of the huge Rancho Milagro, a miracle foster children’s home in the middle of the desert, obviously wasn’t used to having anyone question her commands. He’d only had to be around her for fifteen minutes back at the ranch to know she issued them like royal edicts, a half smile of authority on her princess lips, when no smile existed in her eyes.
He’d found just a little too much pleasure in watching her fight to keep her finely boned face from revealing her anger. And he had far too much interest in speculating what her do-as-I-tell-you mouth might feel like beneath his.
Daggert had to give her credit. She’d ridden for eight hours straight without a single complaint—except about his silence. She’d left her comfortable ranch, following a complete stranger, a man who many called crazy and worse, to look for a runaway boy who’d been only recently deposited at the ranch.
Leeza could have stayed put and called in a host of law enforcement types—Lord knew that with one of her ranch partners married to a federal marshal, she could have had her pick of half a dozen agencies. She could have simply waited with the others at Rancho Milagro, trusting fate to deliver the little boy back home safely. She could have directed the ranch hands to scour the land, searching for the boy who had undoubtedly already run away from a dozen different foster homes.
But Leeza Nelson hadn’t done any of those things. She’d sent the ranch hands searching in the predawn hours. She’d directed law enforcement to check bus stations and highways. And she’d decided she needed to find the boy herself, with the aid of one half-breed Apache, a notorious tracker named Daggert. That she’d taken the trouble to find the best told him a lot about her.
And the set look on her lovely face as she’d refused to back down when he’d announced he worked alone had told him something, as well.
“Not this time,” she’d said coolly. And any man in his right mind would have shivered and asked for a parka right about then.
She hadn’t pleaded, or cajoled him into agreeing; she’d just ordered a horse saddled and a pack prepared. She’d given orders like a general on a campaign and had only shot him that one furious glare at his countermanding her saddle choice.
He’d made it clear he wasn’t going to slow down for her, that if she was determined to force herself on him, he wasn’t going to nursemaid her. If he was going to find this little boy, he couldn’t afford to stop and smell flowers along the way.
And damned if she hadn’t matched him step for grueling step all day.
And despite her overt weariness, she’d still summoned enough spunk to slap him down when he’d slipped his hand beneath her blouse.
With his back to her, he smiled. The lady had grit, he’d give her that, even if she didn’t have the faintest notion of what was what. His smile faded. She was under the impression that she’d hired him to find her missing runaway. That was true, in a way, but there was far more to it than that.
He’d have done it for free, as half the people of Carlsbad would have told her if she’d asked. He was the person everyone called when someone was missing. Not because he was lucky, but because he was relentless. And because he had another agenda.
He loosened her saddle and slid it from the mare’s back. He did the same for Stone, setting all the packs to the south side of the sandy arroyo he’d chosen for the night’s camp, a place safe for that evening, as no storms threatened. It was September and even in drought years rain always fell in that month, the transition from summer into autumn. They’d had rain the night before the boy ran away and they would again in the next four days. Knowing that wasn’t magic on Daggert’s part; it was courtesy of the National Weather Service.
“Hello?”
He turned in her direction.
She was on her cell phone. She’d spent the better part of the first stage of their journey with the little black instrument pressed against her ear, jabbering into it as if it and not people might conjure up the missing boy.
Daggert went back to setting up the camp as she leaned forward, apparently seeking better reception. She’d better have a great conversation tonight, for the Guadalupe Mountains were renowned for interrupting cell phone service. Unless on cliff sides or in high mountain meadows, wireless communication was almost nil in the Guadalupes, and there wasn’t any other kind shy of smoke signals.
“No, not a sign of him,” he heard her say.
Daggert didn’t even bother to shake his head. There had been plenty of signs of Enrique’s progress; he just hadn’t pointed them out to the lady from back east. A piece of a tortilla covered with ants. A chewing gum wrapper. Hoofprints from the boy’s horse—noted because Rancho Milagro used the same farrier that most of the county did, and this particular blacksmith liked to bend one horseshoe nail backward, leaving his distinct signature every time a horse stepped on anything but pure asphalt.
Daggert and the woman were still quite a way behind their prey, but narrowing the gap considerably. The boy hadn’t been able to push his horse very swiftly in the dark the night before. With luck they might catch up with him by noon the following day.
“Okay, you know my number. Call me if you hear anything,” she said, and hung up without a farewell. A no-frills woman. A woman used to running things her way. And probably getting them her way, as well.
Daggert thought that, given a couple of millennia, they might actually find they had a few things in common.
“Are we really stopping for the night?” she asked him with more than a hint of accusation in her tone. “Shouldn’t we just take a rest and keep looking?”
He shook his head and continued setting up camp. Again he felt a reluctant stab of admiration. Grit? The woman had more than mere grit. She had class. She couldn’t have ridden another step, but here she was, ready to get back out there.
Better than she did, Daggert understood the need to continue the search, no matter the hour, no matter the lack of light. The ice princess only believed Enrique Dominguez had run away from Rancho Milagro.
Daggert knew she didn’t have a clue what dangers lurked out there. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she didn’t know she had come in contact with lions, tigers and bears. She had no way of knowing that no one, especially little Enrique, was safe from the dangers lurking in the Guadalupes.
She didn’t have the foggiest notion of what might have befallen the boy just a few yards outside the fence surrounding the massive headquarters of the children’s home—not from rattlesnakes and other animals, though those were prevalent enough. Worse things than nature and nature’s creatures lurked among grasses, stunted trees and thorny shrubs.
But Daggert wasn’t about to tell her what really scared him. He didn’t want to have a hysterical woman on his hands. Not that Leeza Nelson seemed the type for histrionics. But she was still laboring under the idea that the boy she followed was simply running away from a foster care situation, if not—if the ranch hands were to believed—from Leeza Nelson personally.
Daggert knew that accepting such an easy explanation for the boy’s continued absence was almost like selecting his gravestone. Daggert should know, he’d lost his own son that way.
Having finished taking care of Stone, he tended Leeza’s mare. He hummed a little as he worked and, between the brushing and the tuneless susurration, both horses relaxed their bunched muscles and gently whickered their thanks.
He decided he couldn’t call the mare by her given name; Lulubelle was a ridiculous handle. Noble creatures demanded dignified names. He ran his hand down her withers and on down her legs, feeling the powerful muscles ripple beneath his palm. No sign of her being winded, no overt indication of lather, no swelling… Like Stone, she was in prime condition. “I’ll call you Belle,” he told her. “You’re as beautiful as your rider.”
Belle nodded her head as if agreeing with him.
Chapter 2
In the fading light, Leeza watched Daggert touching Lulubelle, and knew a pang of something akin to envy. The man ran his hands over the horse as a lover might, firmly, with sure intent and deliberate strokes. He knew just where to touch the beast to gentle her, to soothe her, to make her understand his wishes. He applied light pressure to her knee joints and, one by one, she lifted her legs for him. He stroked her neck, whispering to her, and she swayed into his embrace. His hand traveled every part of her and she trembled beneath his touch.
By the time Daggert turned around, Leeza’s mouth had gone dry once more, but this time exhaustion had nothing whatsoever to do with it. Her face, usually schooled to reveal nothing, must have showed her every thought because he checked his stride, and his golden eyes seemed to sharpen.
At that moment, she couldn’t have spoken if her life depended on it. He looked every inch the warrior she’d imagined him when she’d stepped out on the veranda earlier that day and coolly announced she was accompanying him on the search for Enrique Dominguez.
But there was more than the warrior in his eyes now. His frozen stance reminded her of something feral, wild. A black wolf, perhaps—wary, dangerous and dominant. The sudden heat in his gaze only underscored the impression. Then he moved again, his stride fluid and muscled, deliberately turning his gaze away from her.
She wondered if she’d imagined what had just happened, then questioned if he’d provided the show with the horse just to drive her crazy. She shook her head. He couldn’t have. He would have to have eyes in the back of his head to know she’d sat there slack-jawed, imagining the touch of his hand on her body instead of the horse’s.
She’d simply been affected by the day’s intense heat.
The difficult ride.
The worry over Enrique.
And the fact that she was wholly out of her element.
Her reaction was nothing more than these things. Absolutely nothing.
But none of those reasons explained away the fire his gaze had lit inside her.
To her relief, Daggert’s dog, Sancho, came running up then, his long, black-spotted tongue lolling. He spat out a branch of some kind at his master’s feet and barked twice before sitting down and panting heavily.
Leeza blushed when Daggert pulled a plastic bowl and cup from one of his packs and poured a little canteen water into each. She’d drunk directly from the canteen. He set the bowl down for the dog and quickly quenched his own thirst. When Sancho barked, he shook his head and picked up the bowl.
“Fire first, dinner later,” he told the dog gently.
He carefully replaced the items in his packs before beginning to gather large river rocks from the arroyo’s sandy banks. The dog settled down in the sand beside the saddles, lay his head on Daggert’s tooled leather seat and gave a great sigh. Like his master, the dog didn’t glance her way.
Leeza looked up to find Daggert standing less than six inches away from her. She hadn’t heard him move. He held out his hand.
She looked at his callused palm as if it might hold snakes. He waited. She placed her stiff fingers in his and was startled by the contact. He might as well have kissed her, so intimate was the sensation of their fingers touching. She could feel the heat of his skin, the roughness of his calluses and some indefinable psychic energy emanating from him.
And when his fingers wrapped around hers and he effortlessly pulled her to her feet, inches from his rock-hard body, she felt the impact arrow through her. She tried removing her hand, but he didn’t release her. She gave him a startled glance and found he was staring at her with a fixed, almost hard look. A wolf’s look.
A flutter of fear and unbridled need made her breath catch.
And still he held her hand, not squeezing it, but not letting her go, either.
“That’s hilarious,” she drawled, but she felt something inside her quaking, both with that strange fear and something else she’d never experienced before.
He said nothing, though he continued to look at her as if forcing her to read his thoughts, understand the meaning of his touch. Abruptly, he let her go.
Her hand hung in the air for a moment, as if he’d hypnotized her and no power on earth would let her lower her limb. Then she jerked it down to her side. It seemed to tingle, but she resisted the urge to look at it. Or at him.
Daggert stacked the river rocks in a circle for the night’s campfire. Even as he performed the methodical task, he felt the woman’s presence. When he’d turned from her horse to see her watching him, with a fire flickering in her gaze and her lips parted and her fingertips resting against her pulsing throat, he’d felt a fuse light inside him. Who’d have thought such a cool customer would have such a look in her eyes?
Could it be she didn’t even know it? Her mouth had snapped shut and her eyes had widened as if she saw something in his face. Maybe she’d spent so many years playing the ice princess that she’d convinced herself she was just that.
He’d told her he wasn’t dead, but until he’d held her in his arms, even if just to keep her from falling down, he might as well have been six feet under. When little Donny died, something in him had been murdered, too. The crippling guilt and scarcely checked rage had turned him away from everyone, everything he knew.
He should have made sure Donny hadn’t walked home alone from his friend’s house. He should have found the boy in minutes. He should have tracked the fiend who’d taken his only son. He should have found the monster and eviscerated him.
Sometimes Daggert wondered if he’d have been okay if his ex-wife had blamed him, too. But she hadn’t. She’d nearly drowned in her grief, but she hadn’t blamed her tracker husband, hadn’t ever said a word to imply she harbored anything but sympathy for his torment. But even with her acceptance, Alma hadn’t been able to get past the terrible pain rioting just below the surface of James Daggert. He’d understood when she gave up one day and left him in the canyons of his own despair. She deserved a life, deserved to find some measure of happiness. He sure as hell couldn’t give it to her anymore.
He thought of the woman who had ridden behind him all day, and of her determination to find Enrique. The fleeting thought that she might not give up on him flashed through Daggert’s mind. He shook his head. That was crazy thinking.
Still, he found some grim satisfaction in knowing he wasn’t dead to sensation, that his body, if no other part of him, could still be swamped with restless need, however painful. He smiled wryly, suspecting he’d be hurting plenty by the conclusion of this particular mission.
He thought about her sad little litany of surface facts about Enrique Dominguez, the way she’d repeated them like a talisman against her exhaustion. He’d done the same with Donny. Not reciting all the little things he knew about the boy—those were carved in his heart—but details about his death.
The fact that no one had seen anyone unusual that day was significant all by itself. A little boy on his way home from a friend’s house didn’t wind up some forty miles away, mangled beyond recognition. Daggert knew that people had seen someone, all right—someone they knew. But because they knew him, they’d forgotten they’d seen him. Because he belonged there. Like fences, like flowerbeds, like grass.
Someone Donny knew. Someone Daggert knew.
